Hello, we are social. We’re a global conversation agency with offices in Singapore, New York, London, Paris, Milan, Munich, Sydney & São Paulo. We help brands to listen, understand and engage in conversations in social media.

We’re a new kind of agency, but conversations between people are nothing new. Neither is the idea that ‘markets are conversations’.

Asia’s digital landscape continues to evolve at an astonishing rate, and staying up to date with the latest data and trends can be a challenge.

We have good news, though: today, we’re delighted to launch a new edition of our hugely popular #SDMW reports.

In the SlideShare presentation above you’ll find our Asian Overview report, with more than 100 slides of the latest facts and figures from around the region, including select highlights from each of the 24 countries we cover.

We’ll follow this overview with individual country reports over the coming weeks, each one packed with all the local stats and facts you need to understand the Social, Digital and Mobile landscapes and audience behaviours in the world’s most dynamic markets (get them here first!).

To start with, though, here are some highlights from the overview report:

There are now well over 1 billion internet users around Asia;

At least 811 million of these people use social media;

50% of the world’s social media users are in Asia;

More than 10 million new people in Asia join Facebook every month;

Asia is home to more than 3 billion mobile subscriptions.

All of these numbers are significantly higher than those we reported in the previous edition of the #SDMW series that we released back in November 2011:

The number of internet users in the region has grown by almost 14%;

Users of the top social network in each country around Asia have increased by more than 8%;

Mobile subscriptions have seen growth of more than 12%.

It’s not just the growth in user numbers that are impressive, however; netizens in Asia spend almost 2 million years of combined time on the internet every month, watching almost 45 billion online videos.

That’s more than half a trillion videos every year.

We also noted a continued trend of diversity in behaviour around the region.

Despite becoming Facebook’s biggest region just a few weeks ago*, the world’s favourite social network ranks just 4th in Asia by user figures. However, Buddy Media found that Facebook is still the platform of choice for brands around the region, with almost 9 in 10 Asian companies giving it a ‘Like’. They also report that two thirds of Asian companies on social media have a presence on Twitter.

Most companies focus the majority of their social media efforts on marketing, but figures suggest an increasing number of Asian brands are adopting social media for customer service purposes too.

Meanwhile, the mobile opportunity is becoming increasingly important around Asia too, with 4 in 5 companies in the region stating that mobile social is “an important part” of their overall strategy.

Be sure to check out the full deck for many more insights. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for regular updates on Social, Digital and Mobile news around Asia and beyond, be sure to check our Tuesday Tuneup and 5FF blog posts each week. Even better, you can sign up to have them delivered to your email by clicking this link.

And for those of you who are stuck behind a firewall and can’t view SlideShare, just send us an email and we’ll be happy to send you a copy of the report.

You’ll find the source for all the stats above at the bottom of the relevant slides inside the report itself. * Note that the countries included in SocialBakers’s classification of ‘Asia’ differs to the one used in our SDMW reports, so figures may not correlate between these reports.

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Facebook has mostly killed off Cyworld in S.Korea. Kakao Talk is huge, and while there is some ‘timeline’ features on the App it is not actually used for a social platform if comparing it against what Cyworld was and what FB is. It is becoming bigger has a gaming platform with games like Anipang. You would of also needed to mention NHN Line App for Japan also then.

– It would of been great when you listed the mobile subscription if you broke down what is feature phone and what is at least 3G connection. With China you have 1.1B mobile subscription but there is only about ~279M 3G connections in China. The mobile landscape in Asia paints a different picture once you realize how many are still on feature phones or 2.5G connections.

http://twitter.com/martybennett Marty Bennett

Great data as usual from WeAreSocial. One point of clarification–in Vietnam, FB has surpassed Zing as the #1 social network with over 8.5 million (up over 145% in the last six months): http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/vietnam

Thanks Marty! You may have noticed we released the individual report into Vietnam today, which details that very shift: http://wearesocial.sg/blog/2012/10/social-digital-mobile-vietnam-oct-2012/

Simon Kemp

Thanks Kent. We’ve been debating about how much focus to put on the messenger apps as part of this research, and we’ve come to the conclusion that we’ll cover it in more detail in the individual country reports. As for mobile, sadly we couldn’t find accurate and consistent data splitting up 2G and 3G, but if you can recommend a public URL with that sort of data we’d be very happy to use it for upcoming country reports!

Simon Kemp

Thanks! We’ll be addressing the issue of Kakao Talk and similar platforms in the Korea individual country report.